


Smokestack Lightning

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Cryptograms [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Drugs, Gen, Outer Space, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Western, future kylo/hux, past ben/poe, space blood meridian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 17:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6337987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The kid is crazy."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smokestack Lightning

The child foretold in the ancient scrolls was brought to them at the sacredest of their ritual moons on the Outer Rim, unconscious and bloody and carried by Snoke like a small dark bride in the torn robes of the false order, at the first dawn of the fated solar year. In the night they had burned wood and wreckage down to white ash over which they prepared a visionary concoction and they watched the movement of the stars in the firmament and prayed together. Some beat themselves with braided ropes and others had taken ritual hallucinogens whilst still others recorded their speech to be combed later for prophesy. And into this hubbub at the dawn coming in the distant blackened sun the child was carried from Snoke's vessel and they gathered to watch in fragile silence as he was delivered into the arms of the knight who was in those liminal days their leader. 

Snoke had put the child out with magic to his brain after he had done what was necessary to divorce himself from his innocence and upbringing — from himself — and those among the Knights who used magic could feel the string between Snoke and the child like a puppeteer's wires. They did not fear Snoke but he was other from them and there existed a sort of mutual distaste that their fates had overcrossed as such and after this they would none of them see each other again. They would communicate with Snoke through the child when was necessary but it would not be often necessary. He asked that they train the child as a warrior which they had also foreseen for Snoke himself was occupied building even then the Order he would oneday officiate and this child was to become the executor of his will. The stiletto blade and the warhammer of his will. He was not to be referred to by his given name again and thus Snoke acquiesced for there to be bestowed upon the child a ritual title in accordance with the Knights' traditions and their laws. Then he departed and his vessel was swallowed into the summoning darkness and they carried the child into the temple. 

While he slept in the bower which had been prepared for him — hung with ritual pieces obtained from trading posts and general stores and silent waystations across the galaxy — they healed his wounds which were superficial and those who were able searched inside his mind for what they did not know but inside it were only some secret things. He had come to arrange his mind in folders and cabinets so he could winnow somewhat through the very busyness of it like rowing molasses. It was like there were two gaping windows in it in the front and the back where he could be influenced and where he learned and lost such that he was never alone inside his mind. He was seventeen years old. His master had been with him a decade or longer but they had not so much as seen one another until hours previous. He had clung desperately to someone as Snoke had tugged him under at the last and it had been the final arterial strand to sever and even still it was unhealed. The cruelest thing his parents had ever done to him was deny him dinner the first they found he had used his magic to kill an animal. For it they had sent him to a kind woman who asked questions whom he resented for she was unpowerful. His memory of the slaughter Snoke had helped him to commit was shadowy and fogged and he recalled the beginning and the end and not so much of the middle but for the screaming which was perhaps his own. There was still blood under his fingernails and his breath was slow and ponderous and he had taken a knife to his hair to cut his braid and the place where it had been was ragged. 

When he woke they had for him bread and broth and he ate slowly and did not speak and he watched them. Select among them felt his touch tentative and gentle in their minds and then he moved on again until he understood. They named him as they did the next night from a ceremony they had long practiced where they knelt him in the floor and fed him mushrooms and had him read from the old scrolls cracking in his big skeletal hands pale and bound about the knuckles where they had been wounded in battle until at last he chose a glyph from the text and showed it to the officiant of the ceremony who had him draw it in his own blood upon the sacred stones with the glyphs of others. And in the morning they packed their things and left that place until next they would return — decades distant — for the next fated child and they brought with them on their strange piecemeal ships strung together of wreckage of Outer Rim expeditions lost and failed this small stalking creature in black who walked coltishly at the rear of their column, who from then on they would call Kylo Ren. 

\--

The weapon Snoke had given him he showed them with reluctance. His hands were big but they were pale and narrow and they folded like bones and they could not wrap fully the hilt of the lightsword. It had killed already several and them young but he had built it himself in secret with his master’s guidance and when he drew it sparks threw brilliant red like a star being born. Rather like the child himself. He was embarrassed and he closed it and did not speak to them again that day. 

When he showed them how he fought against a holoprojection eked from an ancient droid they saw his form was unpracticed and near suicidal and it was in part an ungraceful attempt at the dancerly and delicate Jedi maneuvering and in another part it was pure and unadulterated desperation. His hair stuck in his face but he would not cut it. They ran the holoprojection again. They watched him sweat. When night fell in the mess they had stale bread and broth and he fell asleep at the table. 

\--

He was taught their lore by the oldest among their masters for customarily they did not live past forty standard years. They were the last remaining of an ancient order and while three including the child had been foretold six had joined upon their own volition following inspiring dreams and two had been recruited and one had been purchased from the slave dungeons on Erebus. Centuries ago they had settled sacred moons in colonized space but had been driven from those lands by the Republic to the Outer Rim where they cannibalized scuttled warships and sought odd employment which customarily meant smuggling or contract killing. They claimed no official alignment to any breed of politics and they recognized no central government but they understood magic and ritual and were seduced by promises of land and as such they had aligned with the Empire and as such after its fall they aligned tenuously with Snoke. Himself of uncertain origin though rumor had it in the squalid Outer Rim cantinas he had been a paper-pusher serving under Tarkin who had survived the Battle of Endor through some Faustian exchange and had licked his wounds in a distant mining system until once again whispers began abounding. 

The child hardly spoke in those days but he refused to believe rumors like this concerning his master and he would stand up quickly and stalk away to sulk and would not come in for his dinner and once or twice he drew his weapon with the red shining in his eyes like the rising of some distant sun until whosoever could flicked the switch in his young mind that knocked him out. When he meditated twice daily with his eyes moving very quickly beneath the soft pale lids of them they understood he spoke to his master silently across galaxies and they could not hear, nor did they think they wanted to hear, what it was they conversed about together in the silent shrunken darkness at the heart of everything. 

\--

He was fated to be their leader but increasingly they became uncertain he was capable. Amongst themselves they wondered if his master had not addled something irreparably in spelunking his mind since his toddlerhood. He destroyed ancient relics with his weapon or his hands and then in humiliation he wept. 

They were summoned to the service of employers via messages they received on a glitchy commlink system that necessitated repair once a standard month at least. They met in cantinas with characters of unfortunate renown more than one of whom asked to purchase the child and more than one of whom was executed for the question by means of the child’s searing wild weapon. At first they feared what it would do for business until commissions started pouring in for the services of the young madman. By the time he was twenty he was understood to be the wildest beast of the lot of them — a lot at the time of thirteen consisting of four whose helmets had fully melded to their faces and two who could show their own execution records from Naboo and Tattooine and one who had watched the destruction of Earth from a supply ship across the galaxy and still another who claimed to have attempted sexual congress with Darth Vader who was badly maimed following this assertion in an impromptu duel with the child who by that point was no longer a child, except that he was. 

The kid is crazy, said their eldest in flirtation with the bartender (beautiful and alien and genderless) on a planet whose ancient wreckage was bleached pale and crenellated as ossuary and whose most squalid saloons felt rather like mausoleums polished and holy and whose sun rose once, for seven days, every eleven standard years. In six weeks he, the elder, would cast himself into the sulfurous maw of the living caldera on Dalton 6 in his prophesied ritual suicide for he had lived forty-three standard years and had lost many limbs and much blood and much sleep and was very tired. 

The kid is crazy and there will never be uncrazy for the kid because his master keeps him on a short short leash. 

Master, said the bartender. They understood even in this lawless territory to mind the sale of children and men in fact were strung up for it whose bodies were rotting against the great cathedrals of bone in the near-eternal dark of that world. The child looked and acted younger than he was on account of said short leash and it had gotten the knights in bad trouble more than once, more than, some said, it was seemingly worth. 

Not such as that, said the elder, though he was not sure even then if it were true and what forfeiture the child had done to Snoke and what prostration though he thought of it often guiltily while drunk. The kid had taken no lover within or without the cohort that they knew of — in fact he had taken no lover since the old lover before himself — but the elder often wondered about his dreams. 

The bartender looked to the kid where he sat with a contingent of others and then they looked back at the elder and their eyes were like the moons shifting in tandem in the corner of the sky. In the back corner of the room a band played the classics of this backwater system and strumming a string instrument amplified in static twang through an ancient vibraphone horn carven of the heartbone of some massive beast on one of the far-out ice planets was a small blonde girl either twelve standards years old or not fully human and behind her a band of species and homeworlds assorted who played the reeds and the bells and the sticks and drums and strings of their grand devastating tradition. The elder was wondering at the passage of years. In very many lives he was yet a young man. But he had lost his knack for prophesy and his trips were mostly bad and two years previous he had sustained an injury that he felt on occasion when it was humid, or when it was dry. 

The not-so-young girl stepped to a vocal amplifier and began to sing, and when she did she watched the child. 

_O smokestack lightnin_

_shinin just like gold_

_don’t you hear me crying_

\--

The elder understood after this there would be no more. He was lying in the upstairs room with the bartender and through the open window the moons were coming in and the head upon his chest crawled with lice. In the bed they shared their skin was sticky with sweat and otherwise cooling in the still years of night and he could feel two hearts beating in the other body and he was satisfied. He understood it was the last time he would make love to another person and downstairs through the shaking floorboards he heard the band playing again the same song to a rousing chorus as though time in fact had not moved forward at all. 

He rose. He polished the grille upon his mask with a tail of bedsheet. The dim flashing of red light upon the square like some faltering neon or the brakelights of a hermit’s speeder was in fact the child who went through his form alone and in silence but for the wind with the arcs of his fabrics moving with him like weapons of their own, or like clouds. 

After this there would be no more. The Prophetess Boaz Ren slain at Savage Pass. Los Enmascarados at the crossing of the silty river into the oil shale basin on the fecund and fetid marshworld of Riven. Every lover lost to hanging and to battle and to suicide ritual and otherwise and with them had disappeared two other sacred moons,  including the distant one where they were obliged to welcome their foretold.

The wind was coming ever stronger now from the South and it bore the pale dust of that world like the pollen of scorched bones and in the square the child stopped abruptly and watched the storm. For a moment the elder watched him and then he turned from the window and climbed into the bed. 

 

/ 

 

Years he hated and loved. Years they passed through the asteroid field where the maps ended and then they went beyond into conjectural nothing past the survey ships locked in bureaucracy where they were hired by frontier sheriffs to furnish the scalps of the natives and by frontier natives to furnish the scalps of the sheriffs. They were hired by widows to seek their husbands and by husbands to kill their wives and by children to kill their parents and by armies to kill their generals. Years they worked on planets still unbreathable where the air would burn your skin and the rain was red wet ash smearing blood on the machinations they wore. The droplets burned through his black banthawool coat until on board again he found it was like cheesecloth. He forged his mask himself in the fires of the ancient smithy on a planet the natives called Xluxit while beyond the a-frame of the shelter the rainforest stirred with thunder and nightcalls. 

Years his master was still in his head saying _child, child —_

_Just deeper now. Open up._

\--

Years he walked in the yellow morning wheat and with him they followed. A round dozen like a murder of birds in flanking formation. The dead self would not long ago have turned twenty-eight years old. But perhaps he had been this way since he was born — before his naming and before his master this thing had stirred in his baby soul for a generation or longer awaiting a doomed twin. 

Because he was hungover he was shaking his metal cigarette case between his thumb and forefinger. He had taken up smoking when he had defected from the Knights for a month he spent eating mushrooms in the arms of a whore on the South Wolf. When they found him he had killed his lover perhaps the night before and had not yet realized. But even now there were no cigarettes. 

On this planet they were building railroads. They had not yet been touched. They had gods. They watched the stars. The Republic had spent nearly seven hundred of their years debating their case. He thought of them as some holy votive of innocence. Pressed into a grave or a tree of offerings at a forgotten waystation. But they had been sent to make a death and he had accepted for such a decision had fallen to him. He was not the youngest nor the skilledest warrior but it had fallen to him. And he had made deaths and deaths and deaths since his first such that now even with his not inconsiderable ability he no longer felt the snuff of them — like a small blue flame extinguished by a bell — when they went out. 

Still he was vengeful but he had forgotten what for. He misremembered much. I did not have mine, he was thinking. And he shook and shook the cigarette case. I did not have mine and as such they do not get theirs. But for this he did not blame his master. 

\--

It was time, though he did not understand it as such at first. In fact he feared he had lost his prophesy and he commandeered a vessel and flew to his master’s side and threw himself at the clawed feet of the great cathedra such that his kneecaps cracked and he begged for the return of his gift because he felt like a hooded falcon. His master ran his head through such that the sudden flash of pain arched his spine and then it passed again. 

— You have spent too much time in their company. 

— Master.

— You pay such credence to their mushroom dreaming, Kylo Ren. 

He was made to stand and made to bow. He could have done it for himself but his master preferred the control. 

— You have a vision, do you not. 

— A dream, he said, master. 

— Not a dream. 

He thought he understood. The girl was playing the song from the long ago cantina. Into a red velvet box he was pressing a golden crown of laurels. 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is very much inspired by [this incredible and very moving art by leadlatte](http://leadlatte.tumblr.com/post/141330132424/shoots-people-hes-a-crocodile-he-eats-people) and a lot of texting with [reserve](http://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve) and [imochan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan). otherwise it is basically space blood meridian.  
> smokestack lightning is my favorite classic blues song. perhaps best recorded by [howlin' wolf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ri7TcukAJ8)  
> this is part 1-ish of a series-to-be whose final piece is forthcoming eventually. i tag it with "red right hand" on [my tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) \- join me for mild sin


End file.
